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I am a big journaller. I usually have multiple journals going at any point in time. My longest by far was over at Livejournal, where I wrote from December 2001-December 2011. 10 years almost exactly, writing almost every day.

The blog is still there, despite the fact that I don’t update it any more. It’s a huge chunk of my life, 10 years. There’s a huge amount of emotion in those virtual pages. One of the great things about Livejournal back in the day was the sense of community. Your ‘friends page’ felt like it was full of people who actually were your friends.

I ‘met’ my ex girlfriend there. Once that relationship went sour I couldn’t really be around the site anymore. It just wasn’t the same. Of course there were other reasons to leave. A lot of my friends list had stopped updating, even the communities I was a part of (and the ones I ran and moderated) dwindled their new posts to a trickle.

I went back today and looked through my entries, my friends page, and just around the site in general for the first time in over a year. It was a bit like looking through an abandoned village. Entries just…stop. And you wonder what happened to people, how they’re doing. Sometimes you’ll see them on facebook, or twitter, or tumblr, but it’s never quite the same.

Nor should it be, I suppose. I’m not the person I was when I walked away from my blog there a year and a half ago, let alone anything remotely close to the girl who started writing there over 10 years ago. It astounds me how much we change when we aren’t even paying attention. How major parts of our lives, things that seem like they will forever be in the forefront of our minds, drift away.

Going back and reading old journal entries is not something I do very often, simply because it makes me cringe in embarrassment. But I indulge every once in a while to remind myself that every time something has happened in my life that I thought I would never get over, not only did I get past it but now I can barely even remember why it was so important.